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Hamilton in the midst of a grassroots cultural revival

In the past decade, legions of arts and culture professionals have abandoned Toronto for Hamilton . . . and it&rsquo;s not all about the price of real estate.

Recent additions to Hamilton's emerging cultural elite, who have turned their backs on Toronto and are adding substance to a vibrant arts community in what used to be a cultural wasteland. With Hamilton's steel mills in the background, left to right, developer Harry Stinson, publisher Martinus Geleynse, author Miranda Hill, film programmer Annette Paiement, comedian/producer Colette Kendall, playwright Stephen Near, actor/writer Sky Gilbert, and promoters Judith Sandiford and Ron Weihs. (Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

Born Ruffians perform on the Main Stage Saturday during last summer's Supercrawl arts festival in Hamilton. (Cathie Coward Photos)

Former Toronto band Elliott Brood now calls the Hammer home.

The annual Locke St. Festival drew huge crowds on a spectacular day in 2011. (Ron Albertson / The Hamilton Spectator)

Hamilton's rocker king Tom Wilson at last summer's Festival of Friends in nearby Ancaster. "No other city inspires me like Hamilton does." (Kaz Novak / The Hamilton Spectator)

By GREG QUILL

Fri., Dec. 7, 2012

“People out on the highway look at those smokestacks and think Hamilton is some kind of stink hole,” says Tom Wilson, arguably the Hammer’s most famous contemporary artist, a lumbering, sulphur-breathing rock ’n’ roll animal whose ribald poetry, hairy edges and musky mystique make him the perfect poster boy for the Steeltown that few people on the east side of the QEW divide ever get to see.

“The real Hamilton hides itself behind that industrial veil very well and never casts an eye towards Toronto,” continues the preternaturally restless Wilson. He has reigned as his hometown’s muckraking rocker king for 20 years or more, since Junkhouse ruled the roost, long before his current band, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, made it to the world’s festival stages and Lee Harvey Osmond, his latest adventure, started stretching roots rock into long, hypnotic grooves.

“Hamilton has never been impressed by the things that impress Toronto,” he chuckles.

Yet, Wilson acknowledges, for the last decade or more his hometown, long disdained and dismissed as a depressing backwater has been the destination of a steady migration by artists in all disciplines, mostly from Toronto, but also from the Niagara peninsula.

“I’ve never lived anywhere else because no other city inspires me like Hamilton does,” he adds. “I guess others are starting to find out what’s been going on here. That’s OK by me . . . the more the merrier.”

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Hamilton is already home to more than its fair share of the nation’s best known musicians, writers, visual artists and filmmakers: including songwriter and novelist Ian Thomas and his actor/producer brother, Dave; comedian and TV producer Steve Smith; musician and music producer Daniel Lanois; actor Graham Greene; comic actor Eugene Levy; movie producer Ivan Reitman; comedian Martin Short; and, since 2003, playwright Sky Gilbert, who’s typically unequivocal about his reasons for moving there.

“I was fed up trying to find a home in Toronto’s vanishing neighbourhoods or among the walls of condos,” Gilbert says.

“It’s a city for rich people on one end and ghettoized, frightened suburbanites on the other.

“I love living here. Hamilton has enriched my work. I’ve found a lively, responsive audience: working-class, middle-class, honest and curious. It’s like Toronto used to be, a long time ago. Something’s going on here.”

What’s going on in Hamilton is a genuine grassroots cultural revival, precursor almost certainly to gentrification and the inevitable economic turnaround that Hamilton’s city fathers have been waiting for since the collapse of the steel and auto industries in the late 1980s.

Best evidence of Hamilton’s growing artistic muscle is the year-round Artcrawl, a street festival running several blocks along James St. N. on the second Friday of every month that showcases the new art galleries, designer craft businesses and media art operations that have sprung up in the area, as well as music, literary and theatre events staged by locals.

Every month, crowds attending Artcrawl are larger, says Stephanie Vegh, executive director of the municipally funded Hamilton Arts Council, which helps promote the street festival and its larger September offshoot, Supercrawl. The massive, two-day arts and music festival on James St. N., which is free, has seen its audience grow in four years from fewer than 3,000 to more than 100,000.

Artcrawl was started by a handful of individuals, mostly gallery owners, eight years ago, but since then there has been no central organizing body.

“Like much of what goes on in Hamilton’s arts sector, it’s a completely organic process,” Vegh says. “All you have to do to be part of it is show up.”

Recent high-profile additions to the Hammer’s resident artists are novelist Lawrence Hill and his wife, writer Miranda Hill; guitarist and songwriter Luke Doucet and his wife, songwriter/singer Melissa McClelland; playwright and theatrical producer Stephen Near; and the members of venerated rock band Elliott Brood and their families. They all left Toronto behind.

“Living in Toronto is a challenge,” says Doucet, who bought a Georgian house in midtown Durand four years ago, before he and McClelland hit the road as music duo Whitehorse. They’ve rented their home to friends pending their return to Hamilton.

“We had to overcome the prejudices most Torontonians have about Hamilton, but it wasn’t hard after we took a closer look. We’re not the kind of people who’d be happy in a small country town. Hamilton is vibrant and affordable, a city with all the benefits of urban living: infrastructure, transportation, a VIA Rail link (in 2014) and it’s only 45 minutes from Toronto, if you have to go there.”

Miranda Hill admires Hamilton’s honesty.

“This city has a strong sense of its own identity,” she says. “Despite huge economic difficulties — they’re more self-evident here than in Toronto — Hamilton wears its problems on its sleeve, along with its heart. It has no pretensions. It doesn’t want to be anything else.

“It’s a manageable size, which makes it easy to get to know people. It’s walkable. Neighbourhoods are close. And it has a funky mixed media community that doesn’t get overexcited about what might be the next or latest ‘thing.’ ”

Musician and artist Annette Paiement, now film, performance and special events manager at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, followed friends to the Hammer seven years ago and “found the freedom to engage in all kinds of collaborative cultural activity.”

“I can even afford to buy a house,” Paiement says. “I go hiking on the Bruce Trail, just five minutes from where I live. Hamilton is a real city of sensible proportions. There’s something very honest about this place.”

Martinus Geleynse, a filmmaker, publisher and politician-in-the-making, has been a professional activist in and observer of Hamilton’s burgeoning political and cultural life for five years.

“Hamilton prides itself on not being Toronto . . . or any other city,” he says. “It has a tough past, but no regrets. You take Hamilton on its own terms.”

Geleynse, who has run for city council, publishes Urbanicity, a monthly broadsheet and website that tracks Hamilton’s progress on municipal policy, urban development and economics, contentious public issues and culture.

He’s also director of Hamilton24, an annual series of six festivals that invite emerging filmmakers to produce a complete short film in 24 hours.

“There are so many creative people moving here from Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, London, it’s almost like the Wild West rush,” Geleynse says.

There’s no official count of the size of the shift in Hamilton’s artistic population, but evidence is abundant, despite a downtown core whose battered face still bears testament to the painful transition from big-time, blue-collar steel and auto industry hub to what some of the city’s movers and shakers see as fertile territory for waves of incoming professionals in medicine and health care, IT, education and cultural activities.

Educational institutions are expanding in and around the city of 520,000: McMaster University, Mohawk College, Redeemer University College, the local Brock University campus, the Dundas Conservatory of Music, and half a dozen major private business and technical colleges.

“Hamilton has always been enriched by an abundance of creative talent, particularly in music, but with the expansion of these substantial educational facilities there’s also a large and energetic audience for visual arts, theatre and other artistic enterprises,” says Tim Potocic, co-founder of Hamilton-based Sonic Unyion Records. He’s a native Hammerhead who, like Wilson, has never felt the urge to move away.

Potocic’s business is mining local talent, but he’s not unaware or surprised that Hamilton has worked its way into the consciousness of Toronto’s artists, as they’ve been relentlessly displaced by the condo boom “that’s eating up their studios, work areas and living spaces.”

“Hamilton has everything they’re missing: affordable accommodation, lots of work and performance spaces, clubs, bars and restaurants, and a welcoming, urban infrastructure with a socially aware arts community that’s willing to engage.

No one disputes that the migration of Toronto arts and culture professionals has as much to do with Hamilton real estate prices as with the likelihood of artistic fulfillment.

New figures compilied by the Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington place the average price of a home in Hamilton, based on the total dollar volume of all residential properties sold, at $299,126 in November 2012, an increase of almost 7 per cent over the same period last year, compared to an average Toronto price of $536,128.

A three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Westdale or Durand costs between $400,000 and $450,000, says Elizabeth Parker, a realtor with Hamilton's Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd., compared to $1 million to $1.2 million in equivalent Toronto neighbourhoods, the Annex and Summerhill, respectively.

“But people in the arts tend to prefer the downtown core, Strathcona and the North End, where they can walk or bicycle, and amenities are closer together,” says Parker, who specializes in resettling artists from Toronto. “In those areas you can buy very nice three-bedroom homes for between $250,000 and $300,000.”

Real estate is certainly why Harry Stinson, Toronto’s former condo mogul, came to Hamilton after his empire collapsed a decade ago.

He hoped his skills in redeveloping abandoned properties into deluxe lofts and condos would serve the interests of incoming arts, IT and medical professionals aged 25-44, who now make up 30 per cent of Hamilton’s population.

His Royal Connaught Hotel development in the centre of the city fell apart. But he has held onto the Stinson School (no relation), just a few blocks from Grant Avenue Studio, where Daniel Lanois’s music career began.

The 71-unit Stinson project is more than 75 per cent sold and should be open in the spring of 2013, he says.

The Connaught — what the Royal York used to be to Toronto — still sits derelict in Hamilton’s heart, a sad reminder of a time when the Hammer’s high life, emboldened by frequent visits from U.S. millionaires and mobsters, blazed hot as “Little Chicago” against the cold Puritan glimmer of Toronto the Good.

“The city fathers still have faith in some kind of manufacturing revival, but the population has already moved past that,” says Stinson. “This is no longer a one-company, one-industry town.

“There are three times as many people in the arts and culture business living here now than steel workers and I’ve had no trouble selling suites at the School, even though Bay Street still sees Hamilton as a depressed industrial town.

“It’s not. Hamilton’s esthetics are intact. It still has an impressive inventory of available old buildings. Its history seems to matter to the people who live here. In many ways it’s irresistible.”

Hot Hammerheads

•Ron Weihs and his partner Judith Sandiford, who ran Artword Theatre in Toronto for many years before their building was sold to condo developers in 2006, , came to Hamilton on a whim and have never looked back.

Their Artword Artbar in the heart of downtown is one of several new performance spaces catering to intimate, curated music and theatrical events, and has become one of Hamilton’s primo arts hangouts.

“It reminds us of what it used to be like on Queen St. W. and Yorkville in their prime,” says Weihs. “There’s the same kind of energy, diversity and demographic: perfect for what we do.”

• Playwright and theatre producer Stephen Near moved to Hamilton in the spring of 2010, having hit the wall trying to get his own company up and running in Toronto’s competitive, oversaturated theatre community.

“Emerging playwrights are necessarily self-produced, so unless you’re an established name, you’re at a severe disadvantage,” he says. “After 20 years as an actor, director and dramaturge, it was time to find a new place to start.”

Near found it almost immediately in Hamilton.

“What Hamilton lacks in the number of professional theatre companies it makes up for with a strong entrepreneurial ethic: a lot of individuals developing and presenting new work in a variety of venues . . . all of them so much more affordable than space in Toronto.”

Near’s Interface won first prize in the Hamilton Fringe Festival’s new play competition in 2011 and he will present his latest work, Dark Matter, at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius in the spring. He has formed a new company, Reaching Symmetry, with Theatre Aquarius artistic associate Luke Brown.

• Award-winning stand-up comedian Colette Kendall, whose sideline gig is booking the Staircase Café Theatre, says that like most Torontonians, she only saw the smokestacks and the steel mills of Hamilton before deciding to move here five years ago.

“It’s quite a beautiful city, with wonderful architecture and a very graceful presence. It’s quiet and down-to-earth, and a source of great creativity,” she says.

• Stately Victorian/Edwardian Durand, Hess Village and Gore Park, and the burgeoning gallery/café hubs along James St. N., John St. N. and Ottawa St., where newly renovated gastropubs, performance spaces and galleries are welcoming hangouts.

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